This Egypt family tour of Cairo and Alexandria is built for the way families actually travel: two cities, one hotel base, no internal flights and no five o’clock wake-ups. In four days you will stand at the foot of the Great Pyramid, walk through the largest museum on earth built for a single civilization, climb down into a Roman catacomb, and watch your children run out of questions long before your Egyptologist guide runs out of answers.
Day two is the Giza Plateau in the morning and the Grand Egyptian Museum in the afternoon — the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, the Great Sphinx, and then, two kilometres away, the complete Tutankhamun collection: more than five thousand objects shown together for the first time since Howard Carter emptied the tomb. Seeing the tomb goods on the same day as the tombs is the whole point of doing it in that order.
Day three heads north to Alexandria. It is a long day — roughly three hours each way on the Desert Road — but it buys you the Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa, Pompey’s Pillar and the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, plus a seafront lunch and the first sea breeze of the trip.
Day four is the Cairo that came after the pharaohs. You start in Coptic Cairo, inside the walls of a Roman fortress, where the Hanging Church sits on top of a Roman gate tower and the crypt of Abu Serga is where tradition places the Holy Family during the flight into Egypt. Then Islamic Cairo: the Citadel of Saladin on the Muqattam spur, the alabaster-clad mosque of Muhammad Ali, and the lanes of Khan el-Khalili, where haggling for a scarab turns into a family sport — before your transfer to the airport.
Every departure is private. Your family travels in its own air-conditioned vehicle with its own guide, so the pace bends to your youngest traveller rather than to a coach timetable. Egypt Best Vacations is a licensed Egyptian tour operator and a TripAdvisor Travellers’ Choice winner three years running — 2024, 2025 and 2026 — and every tour is led by a qualified Egyptologist. If you want more time, our full range of Egypt family and kids vacations runs from short breaks to two-week itineraries with a Nile cruise.
Your Egypt family tour starts the moment the aircraft door opens. An Egypt Best Vacations representative meets you inside the arrivals hall at Cairo International Airport holding a signboard with your name, and stays with you through visa and passport formalities — no queues to decode and no forms to guess at with a tired child on your hip. From there it is a private air-conditioned transfer to your hotel, and the rest of the day is yours. Most families spend it in the pool and go to bed early. The pyramids are not going anywhere.
Overnight: Cairo
Meals Plan: No Meals Included
An early breakfast, because the plateau is best before the heat and the coaches. On the Giza Plateau you meet the pyramids of Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure. Khufu’s stands about 138 metres today, closer to 147 when its casing was intact, built around 2560 BC from something in the region of 2.3 million blocks. There is a panoramic stop where all three line up for the photograph, and time at the Great Sphinx — some 73 metres long and 20 metres high, carved from a single ridge of limestone and usually credited to Khafre around 2500 BC.
Going inside a pyramid is possible on a separate ticket. Ask your guide, and be honest with yourself about the low, sloping, unlit passage before committing with small children or anyone who dislikes confined spaces.
After lunch you drive two kilometres to the Grand Egyptian Museum, which opened in full in November 2025 and is now the largest museum on earth dedicated to a single civilisation. A hanging obelisk of Ramses II stands at the entrance and an eleven-metre colossus of the same king fills the atrium. From there the Grand Staircase climbs six levels past some eighty large statues and sarcophagi, arranged so that the higher you go the later the century, and ends at a glass wall framing the pyramids you were standing under that morning.
The reason for doing it in this order is the Tutankhamun galleries. More than 5,000 objects from the tomb are displayed together for the first time since Howard Carter cleared it in the 1920s — the gold mask, the nested shrines, the chariots, the folding camp bed. Having seen a pyramid a few hours earlier, children arrive at the tomb goods already knowing what a royal burial was for. There is a separate children’s museum, a hall for the Khufu solar boat, and — after a morning in the sun — air conditioning throughout. Back to your hotel in the evening.
Overnight: Cairo
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
An early start today. Alexandria sits about three hours north of Cairo on the Desert Road, and the drive is part of the deal — bring headphones, snacks and a download or two. Alexander the Great founded the city in 331 BC, and what survives is a layered mix of Greek, Roman and Egyptian.
You go underground first, at the Catacombs of Kom el-Shoqafa: a second-century AD tomb complex discovered in 1900 when a donkey fell through the roof. A spiral staircase drops roughly 35 metres past a funerary banqueting hall to burial chambers where Egyptian gods have been given Roman armour — Anubis as a legionary is the one the children remember.
Next is Pompey’s Pillar, a single shaft of red Aswan granite standing nearly 27 metres, raised around 298–302 AD for the emperor Diocletian and misnamed by later visitors who assumed it marked the grave of Pompey. It rises from the ruins of the Serapeum, with granite sphinxes for scale and open ground for children to burn off the drive.
Then the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, opened in 2002 as the modern answer to the ancient Library: a tilted granite disc facing the Mediterranean, a reading room stepping down eleven levels, and a children’s library and planetarium inside. Lunch is on the seafront before the drive back to Cairo.
Overnight: Cairo
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
Check out and leave your luggage with the hotel. Today is the Cairo that came after the pharaohs, and it starts in Old Cairo inside the walls of Babylon — a Roman fortress rebuilt under the emperor Trajan in the early second century AD, whose round towers still stand at the entrance to the Coptic quarter.
The Hanging Church takes its name from its position: it was built directly on top of the fortress’s southern gate towers, with its nave suspended over the passage below, and a section of glass floor lets you see the drop. Inside are more than a hundred icons and a marble pulpit on slender columns. A short walk away is the Church of St Sergius and Bacchus, known as Abu Serga, whose crypt is where Coptic tradition places the Holy Family during their flight into Egypt. The Ben Ezra Synagogue completes the quarter — it was in its storeroom that some 300,000 medieval manuscripts, the Cairo Geniza, came to light in the 1890s, and they remain the single richest source we have for everyday life in the medieval Mediterranean.
From Old Cairo you climb east to the Citadel of Saladin, begun in 1176 on the Muqattam spur to defend Cairo against the Crusaders and the seat of Egypt’s rulers for the next seven hundred years. Inside it stands the Alabaster Mosque of Muhammad Ali, built between 1830 and 1848 in Ottoman style and clad in alabaster quarried at Beni Suef. The terrace gives you the whole city on one side and, on a clear day, the pyramids on the other.
Lunch follows, and then Khan el-Khalili, the bazaar founded in 1382 by the emir Jarkas el-Khalili and still the best place in Cairo to buy something you had no intention of buying. Your driver then takes you to Cairo International Airport in good time for your flight. If you are staying on, ask us about extending with a Nile cruise or a few days on the Red Sea.
Meals Plan: Breakfast & Lunch
